We'll miss our corners of a foreign field

The delay in holding inquests on British servicemen killed in Iraq or Afghanistan is entirely unprecedented, brought about by the repatriation of remains to this country.

The practice began during the Falklands and came about because one family insisted on a repatriation. Until then the Commonwealth War Graves Commission had successfully established the principle that British war dead should be buried and commemorated as near the spot where they died as possible. No inquests were held because the cause of death was evident.

There had been a demand for repatriation and for private commemoration during the First World War, but Fabian Ware, the first director of War Graves, opposed both practices. He was influenced by the enormous number of war deaths - but also by what he discovered of personal and family sentiment.

Repatriation was, for financial reasons, open only to richer families, and several tried to bring the bodies of dead sons or husbands home. Inquiry revealed, however, that officers, whose families were most likely to demand repatriation, expressed a strong desire to be buried with their men. Chaplains reported a mood of "the fellowship of death" among fighting soldiers, which pervaded all ranks.

Thus grew up the principles on which the War Graves Commission policy was founded. It laid down that those who died together should be buried together - though, out of respect for soldierly sacrifice, each casualty should be individually commemorated, in a separate grave or by a separate inscription on a joint memorial if burial were not possible.

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Ware also stipulated that there should be a standard headstone. He further stipulated that the inscription on the headstone should reveal only name, service number, age at death, date and place of death, regimental badge and an appropriate religious symbol - a cross, Star of David or Muslim device. At the bottom of the headstone, space was left for the family to place a short personal inscription, if desired.

The result, as the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the commission's cemeteries well know, is extraordinarily dignified and moving. Large or small, the cemeteries perfectly fulfil their purpose to commemorate, honour and console. A glance in the visitors' book testifies to the success of the commission's work. It is not only Britons who write their phrases of appreciation. So powerful is the atmosphere of the war cemeteries that words of respect are written even by Germans in the war cemeteries of Germany, where the dead of bomber command's strategic bombing campaign are interred.

The success of the cemeteries is thanks to the employment of three key figures from Britain's cultural life at the beginning of the 20th century: the architect Edwin Lutyens, his gardening collaborator Gertrude Jekyll, and the poet Rudyard Kipling, himself a bereaved parent of the First World War. Lutyens supplied the stripped-down classical designs of gateways, walls and garden buildings. Jekyll chose the distinctive plants: roses, ivies and creepers. Kipling wrote the words: "A soldier of the Great War known unto God", "Their name liveth forever more" and the cunningly sharp indication of a missing body: "Believed to be buried in this cemetery".

Design is not the only ingredient of the cemeteries' potent aura. Quite as important is the daily work of the commission's gardeners. The cemeteries were originally laid out and planted by British gardeners, trained at Kew, who then settled in the vicinity of their work in France and Belgium. As might have been expected, these exiles often married local girls, thus setting up what have become gardening dynasties. Their descendants, now sometimes in the fourth generation, speak a distinctive form of "Commission English", perfectly fluent but in an accent that is neither quite English nor quite local.

In Egypt, Burma and India, commission gardening jobs, valued because of the regular pay and pensions they attract, have become virtually hereditary. The gardeners display extraordinary loyalty, as was recently discovered by British troops in Baghdad, where the head gardener, though unpaid for many years, had defended the Great War cemetery against vandalism and kept it as tidy as possible.

The almost autonomous and self-governing status of the war cemeteries abroad is likely to diminish as families now opt to repatriate the remains of servicemen killed overseas. The practice, authorised by Margaret Thatcher, is likely to become universal, as it is in America, because of the growing desecration of foreign soldiers' graves in the new battlegrounds of the "war on terror".

That is entirely understandable. Something will be lost, however, from British culture in the process. The overseas cemeteries are islands of something distinctively British in the countries where they exist. They plant replicas of British country churchyards in foreign climes and reproduce the style of British cottage gardening in places far from home. The French call the lawns which surround the graves "English grass". No British visitor easily stifles the catch in the throat that entering a commission cemetery provokes. Brooke's "corner of some foreign field that is forever England" palpably exists inside the trim stone walls that the Commonwealth maintains in places as far apart as Crete, Zimbabwe, the former Soviet Union and Central America.

The legal need to hold inquests over the remains of anyone brought into a coroner's district explains why families are now understandably distressed by delays that formerly never arose.

Older generations will recall that, before repatriation became the norm, families almost without exception accepted the commission's custody of their dead and were comforted and consoled by the beauty the commission created. It may be said that the tragedy of the two world wars was genuinely alleviated by the building and conservation of the cemeteries.

Indeed, the only country where our war graves are not models of commemoration and solicitude is our own, where war graves, often isolated in neglected municipal cemeteries, become the targets for the mindless vandalism of youths too ignorant and uncaring to understand why the War Graves Commission exists. The commission is now encouraging local schools to adopt war graves in their neighbourhoods, a policy that is meeting with appreciable success.